Revolutionary or not, our postgraduate film degree must still meet stringent university education guidelines. This led me to unplag.com – a website for educators . Unplag.com has an app for detecting plagiarism. I was very curious. I’ve just this month had a competitor who has taken one of our exciting new courses and claimed it to be their own. Sure enough, the plagiarism app confirmed the truth. Most of their web page had been copied from ours. Kerching.

Unplag.com has an excellent website on the different types of plagiarism. While much has to do with academia I thought there were several points of relevance to screenwriters. For example, in the writing courses I teach I am constantly amazed how often the same idea is rehashed and rehashed. Unplag.com calls this ‘self-plagiarism’.

So, fasten your seatbelt and have a quick scan down the page to see if any of the 9 ‘circles’ of plagiarism strike an accord. Once alerted, you can now avoid!

Elliot Grove is the founder of Raindance Film Festival and the British Independent Film Awards. He has produced over 700 hundred short films and also five feature films, including the multi-award-winning The Living and the Dead in 2006, Deadly Virtues in 2013 and AMBER in 2017. He teaches screenwriting and producing in the UK, Europe, Asia and America.